Part 4 : Guerrilla marketing and CPC, CPA, and CPM marketing

What do people miss on their website that's an easy thing they could do to build subscribers to their newsletter?
The biggest thing I see all the time when I go to a website is that a lot of them don't put a subscription form on the main page. That should be a no-brainer. Easy! You need to put the form on the first page the user will see. On Lockergnome there are three forms on the first page. I want to make it convenient for anyone to immediately subscribe.

What are some forms of guerilla marketing that anyone can use to build up subscribers?
As far as guerilla marketing, you're going to get the most bang for your buck, and get the majority of your subscribers, by doing ad swaps. Advertising in other people's newsletters, and making strategic partnerships. You build each other up by brand recognition.

Is there one thing, in your opinion, people must have to be successful in e-mail publishing?
They need to have passion for their idea, you can't B.S. someone on the Web. The Internet is built really so that marketing does not work. For instance, this whole advertising game and deals with CPA's and CPC's are so incredibly stupid.

Why?
Let's say you wanted to advertise in the newspaper, would you call up the newspaper and tell this "branding vehicle", this newspaper that you're only going to pay them for the people that cut out the coupon that you placed in that newspaper? So what makes people think that it's any less stupid to tell a "branding vehicle" that just happens to be online that they are only going to pay for everything that happens. Just because the Internet is quantifiable doesn't mean that it needs to be quantified or that it's resting in the quantification of something.

Branding is still important. If I said, "Online bookstore," the first thing that pops into someone's head is Amazon, and whether people use it or not, they're going to say that name and that's called branding.

I personally think that CPA's and CPC's do more harm than good because they drive people like me out of business. I will go to my grave saying this. Because with guys like me out of business, the people that want to get their product in front of people can't do it.

CPM is the only viable advertising model. What we've had is a flooding of mediocre to bad newsletters being published which drives down click-thru rates, driving down CPM's and increasing CPA and CPC rates. That's why I choose not to accept if at all possible a CPA ad or a CPC ad. Actually we may have a link to Amazon because we need to but CPM is the only real advertising model to pursue.

Let's say I get set up on a CPA thing and people see it but they don't click it and they don't get it, according to CPA it's a cost per action. Now they go to another person's site and they see the same link and they click through and they decide, "Hey, I'll buy this." Who got the credit for this acquisition? It wasn't me, even though I've been branding it for them. So what they're telling me is they want me to pay them for branding their product?

Do you have any final thoughts for us, Chris?
The Internet is not about technology or computers, it's about people. The thing that's still the most amazing and difficult to comprehend is how quickly information can spread. To this day, the thing I look forward to most is checking my e-mail.